Commentaries

Like the best-selling Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, the Anchor Yale Bible Commentary is notable for the broad range of its contributors. Top Protestant, Catholic and Jewish scholars have all brought their skills to bear on the Old and New Testaments, as well as the Apocrypha. The founders of this project, William F. Albright and Professor David Noel Freedman, aimed to assemble scholars from different theological perspectives, and the massive resulting commentary is “accessible not only to scholars but also to the educated nonspecialist.”

In addition to theological breadth, the AYBC is notable for offering each author’s personal translation of the book each volume focuses on. Most commentary sets include the text of a single established English translation (as the NAC and the NIVAC do with the NIV text), but the AYBC offers what is essentially a “new” translation from its diverse scholarship. In Accordance, this means the ability to search the words of the Bible translation with the Translation field, without interference from the rest of the content.

As well as the Translation and a thorough Introduction, many of the volumes of the AYBC have not one but two sets of verse-level comments. One is Textual Notes, which focuses more on text-critical and linguistic details of the text. The other is Notes, which is more general commentary on the verse at hand. Most volumes also feature a broader Comments section that examines the passage as a whole instead of at the verse-level. The Accordance module allows for the user to scroll the AYBC in parallel with a favorite Bible Text, or to read it in a separate pane.

Several Bible books are covered over the course of multiple volumes. This speaks to the depth of the scholarship represented in the AYBC. Milgrom’s three-volume commentary on Leviticus is an enormous work of scholarship, and is much easier to carry around in Accordance! And interestingly, commentators Baruch Levine and Jacob Milgrom are also featured in the JPS Torah Commentary, with Levine on Leviticus and Milgrom on Numbers.

This long-awaited set of commentaries features the work of such noted scholars as Joseph Fitzmyer, Markus Barth, Raymond Brown, Craig Koester, and Luke Timothy Johnson. The OT and NT works in this AYBC set are frequently referenced by many of the authors of the other Accordance commentaries we have already released. Replete with the authors’ personal translations, Textual Notes and Comments, this commentary set will be one you’ll want to refer to as well.

If you’re gathering background information on a passage you’re teaching from, you can use Accordance to scroll along in parallel with a favorite Bible Text. You can cite a passage from the author’s comments using Copy as Citation, while writing an academic paper. Accordance takes all of the valuable information in the AYBC and makes it even more accessible and useful in your Bible study.

New Testament

This commentary set covers the entire New Testament (with the exception of Matthew) plus additional parallel volumes for First Corinthians and Revelation. This product contains two separate modules. The main module (Anchor-NT) covers the entire New Testament with the exception of Matthew.

OT Sections Also Now Available

With so many volumes available in this series, for the first time we are allowing Accordance users to purchase the Old Testament volumes in sections. This will allow gradual acquisition of the entire series in stages for those with limited budgets.